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I wonder if the differences are due to extracting the result from the GPU. There is no doubt whatsoever that doing 2D with OpenGL on the GPU will be faster than a software rasterizer - what kills the performance in these tests is having to copy the result back to the CPU so it can be displayed in an X window. Once X windows are fully composited and output graphics never leave the GPU memory, the hardware acceleration will no doubt prove to be the fastest.

Think about what you are asking here: you are trying to protect equipment from a bunch of jerks who don't follow the rules on how to properly take care of it, and are offering a solution that requires them to voluntarily log their actions. If they don't follow proper equipment maintenance rules, they aren't going to follow your logging rules either. If any voluntary system works for you, it will be when you have no jerks. If you have damaged equipement, then you have jerks. If you have jerks, you must have some sort of mandatory access control, such as signing out equipment using an id checked by the person in charge of the inventory. Anything less secure than this will be abused by jerks. After all, you don't expect them to sign out equipment they are planning to destroy, are you?

Nobody uses a facebook profile to determine if a prospective employee is a good fit - they are instead looking to determine if the prospective employee is a bad fit. With so many candidates for every position, there is an increasing need to disqualify people, and facebook is an excellent place to find dirt on them. If a capital offence can be found in six lines written by the most honest of men, anyone with an active facebook profile is entirely worthless.

I think I'll go hunt some af7caaf1e73a2d24924371a370b4ef9b so I can feed my 362842c5bb3847ec3fbdecb7a84a8692 and a nice quiet evening with my 34b46c8cf192431e84ea81109660367b, chatting about the difficulty of talking about a474fb23f886eeaa16223eba872e53b1 that some socially inept scientist decided to name with a hash function.

Once upon a time, there was an open source developer who published an open source project on GitHub and declared that he was going to make a lot of money from it. People were curious; how could he make any money from what he gave away for free? So they asked him what his secret was.

He thought a moment and said: "You too can be making money from your free software project. All you need is to become a consultant.""Really?" exclaimed the people "We never thought of that! What do you consult about?""I consult companies on how to make money from their open source projects""Oooh. That's clever. Uh... but what do you use your OSS project for?""Sometimes those companies sometimes hire me to write something for them.""Your OSS project?""Well, no. They usually want something different made.""But it's open source, right?""Uh, no.""So your advice is basically to put your OSS project on your resume so companies know you can code and then will give you a job?""Well, yes...""So you are not really making any money from your OSS project, you are just using it to get a job?""Uh..."

It is worth pointing out that all developers are power users, and will write applications first for themselves unless they are paid to do otherwise. The reason Windows is so popular is the sheer number of applications available for it. Once the "newbie" interface is segregated from the "power user" interface, there will be a lot fewer applications written for the former due to everyone but the big companies leaving for more useful environments. Fewer applications, and the unlikelihood of anybody writing any anytime soon, is what is killing Metro. If you aren't selling to developers first, you will lose - nobody buys Windows to run Windows.

Encryption can be broken, especially the kind that exposes useful information about the plaintext as this one does. A much simpler alternative is to keep your genetic information in your own control, processing it on your own computer with open source software. You know, just what we already do with other sensitive information like passwords.

So how far are you willing to take that argument? Some of us, like Bolt Usain, have longer legs and so can run more efficiently. Some, like Michael Phelps, have big feet and a swimmingly efficient body shape. Whatever personal ability you may have, their genetic advantage will beat you every time. They may not be engineered, but they are all freaks, because that's what you have to be to win in today's olympics. I don't know why people bother watching it - it's kind of like a freak show, but less entertaining. I mean, why would I care that one freak can run a course 0.01 seconds faster than another? The olympics are dead. We should just get rid of it.

Gee, a service I have never heard of before is saying that maybe I have a valuable stash of bitcoins given to me by grateful users of my OSS project and that for a small fee they would be happy to liberate it for me for a tidy profit. Where have I heard this before?

I would add that vibration and handling are likely to contribute to failures. If you mount each drive on rubber grommets so it's isolated from the others, it should last longer. Failures are usually mechanical and less disturbance it gets, the better.